The Sanbornton Bridge Ambush That Never Happened

Every taproom from Franklin Falls to Meredith Bridge has told you of the Sanbornton Bridge Ambush, and every one of them told it wrong. I mean to open this story the way I would open an abscess: slow and deep, with a bucket handy. Barnaby, my black bear, lies asleep on his chain outside my window as I write. He has lately eaten a sack of meal, a ham hock and the left boot of a Gilmanton peddler, and he weighs four hundred pounds, most of it resentment. With him quiet, we may sort the rumor from the record.

The Ground and the River

First, the ground. Sanbornton Bridge is a mill village on the Winnipesaukee River, which is what the great lake lets out of its mouth. The river comes down through Laconia and tumbles through the mill dams at Sanbornton Bridge. At Franklin it meets the Pemigewasset, and the two go on together as the Merrimack, like two drunks leaning on each other the whole way to the sea. Northfield lies on the far bank. Between the two stands a covered bridge, dark as a coal cellar at noon, with planks loose enough to rattle your back teeth.

The Boston, Concord and Montreal rails came through around 1848, and since then the village has had the telegraph, the newspapers, and a station platform full of strangers. News travels faster there than anywhere else in this part of the state. Lies travel faster still, for a lie need not stop at every depot to unload the truth.

Then came the war. In 1862 Congress passed the Revenue Act and divided the country into collection districts, each with its own federal assessor and collector. The revenue men did not find stills with a divining rod. They found them by tips, and the law sweetened the pot. An informer could claim a share of the fines and the seized goods, which was called the moiety. Once that took hold, every jealous husband in Merrimack County found he took a patriotic interest in his neighbor's woodshed. Every man who had lost a horse trade, every widow cut out of a will and every deacon with a grudge suddenly loved the Union like a son.

Twelve Deputies and Not One Line of Ink

Here is the tale as the Crown and Anchor crowd tells it. In the fall of 1863 a runner was bringing a wagonload of cider brandy down from Gilmanton way. In the black of the covered bridge, three deputies waited for him with muskets. He saw a pipe glow, whipped up his team and went through so fast the planks caught fire. One deputy was knocked into the river. Another fired and put a ball through a copper kettle in the wagon. The runner was never seen again.

At the next tavern there were six deputies. At the one after that, a revenue collector from Concord hung from the rafters like a bat in a stovepipe hat. By Meredith there were twelve deputies and a brass band, all hidden in a bridge that could not hold four cows. A Franklin man told me the runner was a woman dressed as a Baptist. Another swore it was a ghost. A third swore it was his cousin, and the cousin was buying. Every telling agreed on one point only: the teller's cousin had been there, and the teller was the hero.

So I did what any dentist does with a man who swears his tooth does not hurt, and went looking where it hurts. I read the Concord papers, the Patriot and the Independent Democrat, for that whole autumn and the next. They print every court case, every horse thief, every man fined for beating his mule on the Sabbath. Neither paper printed a line about any ambush. The clerk of court had no warrant, arrest, seizure or inquest on his books, and no deputy drew pay for night work at that bridge. I did find that in the same week half the sheriff's men in the county were at a fiddle dance in Northfield. Two of them came to blows over a schoolteacher, and it went on the record because one sued the other over a coat.

The Craft of the Planted Lie

Why did the whole valley want to believe it? Revenue men are like trout. You do not chase a trout. You put something shiny in the wrong part of the stream and let him chase it. Suppose a runner meant to move a load down the Sanbornton road on Tuesday. On Saturday he made sure the taproom heard that deputies were watching the covered bridge. Every taproom has a man who drinks with both sides, so the story reached the deputies. Then they had to choose between watching the ford and watching the bridge. While they chose, the runner went by a third road, a logging track through the pines that nobody had mentioned.

A planted rumor by itself is weak tea. Carve this law over your door: a rumor without a witness is gossip. A rumor with a witness is intelligence. A rumor with a witness and a Bible is federal business. For a witness there was old Moses Gile of Loudon. He would swear to anything for a plug of tobacco, and for two plugs he would weep as he swore. Moses swore to the pipe glow and the musket. By the third telling he swore he had pulled the deputy from the river by the collar and been bitten for his trouble. He showed people the bite. It was from his own dog.

I will confess that I paid for one of those plugs. I did not start the tale, for it was already loose. But I had rye of my own going out the Suncook way that week. Anything that kept the county's eyes on the Winnipesaukee was worth a nickel of Virginia leaf to me. Everyone was content except the truth, and the truth has never once bought me a drink.

The moiety cut both ways. Horace Twombly, a Gilmanton fellow who could smell reward money the way a fly smells a privy, decided Fort Wilkins hid a hundred barrels. One night just after moonrise he came over my back fence to count them. He did not know that Barnaby's chain was twelve feet long, and he landed at eleven. Barnaby took the seat clean off his trousers, along with a respectable portion of what was in them. Horace went back over the fence without touching it. I stitched him up the next morning, and he bit a leather strap clean through while I worked. He ate standing until Thanksgiving and never filed his claim.

Not every man will swear for tobacco. Silas “Hacksaw” McAllister, now hammering copper at the Fort Wilkins foundry, was once offered a good pair of tin snips by a runner. All he had to do was tell the deputies he had seen men waiting at the bridge. “I don't swear to what I didn't see,” said Silas. “It's like a weld: if it isn't sound, I don't put my mark on it.” When three deputies came asking the next morning, he told them all of it. He said the runner would take the Belmont road at four o'clock, driving a sorrel mare with one white sock. The deputies decided that nobody tells it that plain unless he is covering something. They rode to Belmont to prove Silas a fool, passed the runner on the road and tipped their hats to him.

What the Copper Told

The famous kettle hangs over the bar of the tavern at Sanbornton Bridge, with a card that reads “shot through at the ambush.” The keeper brought it to Silas to mend a split seam at the bail and asked him to leave the bullet hole alone, for history. “Copper always tells the truth,” Silas told me. “When a musket ball hits a sheet of copper, it stretches the metal into a crater before it tears.” A real ball hole has thin, ragged edges and a lip cracked like ice on a puddle, with gray lead smeared down inside. This kettle had a dozen round, even dimples of one size, each overlapping the next a little, the mark of a ball-peen hammer swung in a steady rhythm. Whoever did it had started on the inside and switched to the outside halfway through. The keeper turned red as a radish and owned that he had paid a Franklin smith a dollar to beat it. He has taken eleven dollars a year on the story ever since, which is a better return than any bank in Concord ever paid. Silas mended the seam with good silver solder and left the dents. He will not swear that they are bullet holes.

Silas's family knew the decoy trade well. Back in the forties, before the war, a Gilmanton cider man asked his father for kegs that sounded full but were empty. The elder McAllister lined twelve oak kegs tight to the staves with thin copper sheet and left a dead-air space inside. Rolled onto a wagon, they boomed like drums at every rut. The driver crossed the Sanbornton bridge at a rattling trot, looking nervous, which came easily to him, and half the county's watchmen chased him clear to Northfield. Meanwhile forty kegs of cider brandy crossed by the ford below the mill dam at a walk. When the watchmen pried the bungs and found air, the driver said he was taking empties to a cooper. That was true, for Silas's father was the cooper.

Silas's grandfather built a warning, not a lie. Under a loose plank at the Northfield end of an old covered bridge, he nailed a thin copper sheet to the stringers, leaving a small gap. A man on foot or a light buggy made no sound. A heavy wagon, of the kind a posse brings to haul off barrels, pressed the plank onto the copper and sounded like a church bell dropped down a well. Twenty years later the bridge was replanked, and the carpenter asked what the sheet was for. The old man said it was a sounding board for the choir.

Copper in the Vapour's Road, and the Cuts

First, the plain truth: making distilled spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. What follows is history and natural philosophy. I have been arrested twice, and you need not make it a family tradition.

Copper does its best work in the vapour. It cleans where the hot vapour rubs against it: in the helmet, the swan neck and the worm in the cooling tub. The stink rides in the vapour. A copper pot with a tin neck is a pastor who preaches Sunday and gambles Monday. If a man cannot have copper both above and below the boil, he should put it above.

The run comes out of the worm in order, much as news comes down the Winnipesaukee. The foreshots and heads come first. Like rumors, they are first out of the spout, smell loudest and leave you a headache by morning. They carry the poisonous light spirits and go to the ground or the lamp, never to the mouth, not even as a toothwash. Then come the hearts, the honest middle of the run, clean, sweet and steady. Last come the tails, oily and dull, smelling like a wet dog that has been to a funeral. Set them aside to run another day.

Conduct the experiment so. One: catch the run in many small clean jars, more than you think you need, each numbered, and never in one big crock, for that is how a man drinks his heads by accident. Two: keep a gentle fire. A slow, steady fire separates the cuts cleanly, and a fierce one smears them together. Three: throw away the foreshots generously. A careful man throws away more than he must, and a dead man threw away less. Four: let the jars breathe, then go down the row with your nose. Sharp, solventy, varnish-like jars are heads. Where the smell turns clean and sweet with the grain, you are in the hearts. Where it goes flat and slick between the fingers, you are into tails. Five: never walk away from a running still. Alcohol vapour near an open flame will burn a still-house to the stone. Silas adds the smith's caution: every joint must be tight and of honest metal, for a weeping joint near the fire is a fuse.

The valley's mash in the sixties was mostly cracked corn with some rye or barley for spice. It was cooked, cooled to blood-warm and set with yeast in an open tub under a cloth, somewhere warm with fresh air. After a few days of foaming and muttering it went quiet and tasted sour rather than sweet, and then it was a wash. The mash makes the flavor. The cuts decide whether the spirit is fit for a decent man or a wake.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Bead

A talking cylinder came by post from Cletus “Rabbit” Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. His uncle swears that the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Wood ash is mostly potash and lime. It is alkaline, the same ash every New England grandmother ran through her ash-hopper to make lye for soft soap. In a hot thump keg it begins making soap of your spirit and leaves a slick, bitter, washday taste and a cloudy jar.

On the oak, the uncle is half right. Oak in a hot doubler does give tannin, a little color and a woody taste, and some distillers put wood or fruit in the thump keg on purpose to flavor the spirit. But flavoring is not cleaning, and red oak is the wrong oak. Its pores run open like a sieve, and that is why coopers make spirit barrels of white oak, whose pores are naturally plugged tight. Red oak in a thump keg is like a Boston lawyer in a church: it gives the room some color but will not save a single soul. Nothing you drop in a pot or a keg pulls out the heads. They come out of the spout early, and the only cure is to catch them in their own jars and throw them away.

The shake test deserves a blow as well. Big beads that hang tell you roughly how strong the liquor is, and nothing more. They tell you nothing about poison, lead from a bad joint or uncut heads. A jar that would blind you can bead as prettily as a parson's daughter at a harvest dance. A fresh copper stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. goes to Wilkesboro for Rabbit. Tell your uncle to use his ashes for soap and his oak for barrels, white oak only. He is a good storyteller and a poor chemist, which is the best kind of uncle to have.

The lesson of the Sanbornton Bridge is this. Every tavern had a version, and every version had a witness, but none of them had a record. When a story comes with a hero, a cousin and a sworn man with tobacco in his cheek, go to the papers, go to the clerk, and go look at the copper. When a story sounds too plain to be a lie, follow it to Belmont. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.